THE ARTIST AS CANYON JUMPER

Chris Burden stands one misty spring morning on a dirt road above his 65 acres of rugged land in the hills of Topanga Canyon. He’s been hiking and answering endless questions about his life, land and art. Suddenly, with a sigh, he throws out that impossible question that all artists have to answer for themselves. “What is art?” he says, as if trying, finally, to finish an old argument.

It’s not a surprising line of inquiry from someone famous for stretching the definition of the word. After all, he is best known for an art performance, now three-plus decades old, during which he had a friend shoot him in the arm. He once spent 22 days sleeping in an art gallery as viewers came and went. He had a museum dig nine feet down into its flooring to expose the building’s structural foundation, and, a few years ago, he created an elaborate balancing apparatus to make a 12-ton steamroller “fly.” Recently he has been building a 35-foot long bridge from replica Erector Set parts made of stainless steel--his latest in a series of sculptures made from toys.

Throughout a 30-year career marked by international fame and notoriety, each new artwork he has made has provoked new and ever more challenging answers to this simple question. But his own response, like so much of what he does, is unexpected.

“It’s about trying to frame something,” he says, adopting the most traditional notion of art-making as his hands try to make an imaginary frame around his face. “And draw attention to it and say, ‘Here’s the beauty in this. I’m going to put a frame around it, and I think this is beautiful.’

“That’s what artists do,” he says with passion. “It’s really a pointing activity.”

At this moment he is not really talking about a painting in a frame, but rather about his intention to build a rudimentary suspension bridge between two mountains on his property, which since the mid-1980s has been the home and workplace he shares with his wife, sculptor Nancy Rubins. He’s also talking about a model bridge he built for an exhibition from vintage Erector Set parts about five years ago, a 15-foot-long structure that stands 9 feet high and includes 35,000 parts. Called the “Mexican Bridge,” it is based on a never-built serpentine cast-iron structure designed by a British engineer in the 1860s to span a gorge in Mexico.

“I’d look at the illustration in the book, and I’d say, ‘Isn’t it sad that that was never made?’ It sounds super cornball to say, ‘It’s about beauty,’ but to me that thing was structurally a beautiful thing.”

If this traditional view of art seems a long way from Burden’s more radical performances, a series of far-ranging conversations during the past several months suggests that his language is becoming as elastic as his work. For Burden has been pointing--and framing--and making his audience look again for years. And if what he has shown us has not always been as beautiful as the bridges he’s making today, his ardent belief in the value of really seeing--of examining anew what we think we might know--has been a consistent theme.

Always prolific, Burden’s work has mostly been sent to Europe in recent years. Through a coincidence of timing, however, a selection of new works can currently be seen at three local venues--the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) in Hollywood and the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in West Hollywood--the first major showings of his work in Los Angeles since 1998.

The artists who have pushed art’s limits have often been the most hated--and only later loved. Michelangelo for the exotic realism of his Sistine Chapel ceiling; Van Gogh for the passion in his brushwork and palette; Picasso for breaking down the human image into prismatic shards. Shocking in their own times, those visionaries seemed pretty conventional in 1971 when Burden blew the definition of art wide open with a single gunshot.

Why did he do it?

Burden was not working in a vacuum. It was a time when many artists were exploring how to use their bodies in their work, and not just as the subject of a painting or sculpture. They also were examining issues of autobiography, vulnerability and danger. Burden pushed these ideas to the extreme.

He knew that having himself shot would make him famous, although it took about two years for word of his action, done while a grad student at UC Irvine, to seep into the public consciousness. Once the news got out, he was derided in the popular press and became a subject of hot debate in the art world. Was “Shoot,” as the piece was titled, an expression of pain or profundity? Art or artful exhibitionism?

To hear him talk about it now, “Shoot” sounds like a scientific and psychological test to help reconcile the artist with his era. “It’s the time of Vietnam and everybody’s getting shot,” he says. “People are getting shot on TV, guys my age in Vietnam are getting shot up, the American myth is being shot and the cowboys and Indians are being shot. There’s convenience store robberies; everybody’s being shot. So what the hell’s this being shot about?

“Everybody’s trying to avoid being shot,” he says, so he asked himself, “OK, now let’s just for the sake of imagination and curiosity, flip it over. What if you did it on purpose? What would that mean? What would being shot mean? If a bullet just nicks my arm and a drop of blood comes out, would that be being shot? Whew, that’s an interesting idea. I’d be right there in that weird gray area, wouldn’t I? Some people would say, ‘No you weren’t shot at all, you were just nicked.’ Well, that’s as close to being shot as I really want to get.”

At least that’s how he psyched himself into it. As it turned out, the 22-caliber rifle that his friend aimed at him from 15 feet away sent a bullet through the flesh of his left arm.

Burden says that despite the 30 years that have passed since “Shoot,” he is asked about it all the time. And while he has moved on from such performances, he still considers “Shoot” among his best work; a very clear action with a clear purpose. He talks about it without emotion, as if from the outside, yet when asked whether he thinks he inadvertently became more famous as a result, Burden scoffs: “You know what? It’s all speculation, because it’s not what happened. It’s just irrelevant. That is what went down.”

Paul Schimmel, chief curator at L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art, organized a retrospective of Burden’s work at the Newport Harbor Art Museum in 1988 and is one of the artist’s closest friends. “When Chris [did] ‘Shoot,’ in some ways it was the end of an era,” he says. “It was the last thing that you could do to prove that art is mightier than all. And Chris is the opposite of a daredevil. He’s a complete chicken when it comes to his own body. But he’s fearless about art.”

At 57, Burden has a bounce in his step, and he has lost the vulnerable look that once stood in such contrast to his bad-boy image. Sandy-haired and physically fit, he hikes the mountains or swims in his lap pool each day. He appears friendly and shy, though many of his admirers consider him unapproachable and hold him in awe.

Burden knows he was once seen as the “Evel Knievel of the art world,” but today he seems to be an odd combination of opposing forces that have more to do with executing ideas than showing off. He is a literalist--focused like a scientist on making real what he imagines. He is also a romantic, whose visions often defy and test the known world. And he is an aspiring engineer who still loves to play with toys.

For months, Burden’s hangar-like studio has been filled with the bridges he’s building for the Gagosian Gallery show, a project done with the support of L.A. art dealer Fred Hoffman. These can be seen alongside two Plexiglas cases containing 10 bullets he had cast from 22-karat gold. A 37-foot-tall, 400-square-foot “skyscraper” he built in collaboration with TK Architects to be set in a canyon on his property is currently on view at LACE, and he’s one of a group of artists who made model houses for “Trespassing: Houses x Artists,” at the MAK Center. He’s also several years into the process of restoring 139 cast-iron lamps that once lit the city of Los Angeles, and he plans to exhibit those in January at Gagosian Gallery’s Chelsea branch, his first gallery exhibition in New York since 1996. He has just sent off his preliminary proposal for a sculpture of a metal double skyscraper for a public-art competition in London. That skeletal building structure extends his use of the stainless-steel Erector Set pieces, and he recently completed a “Beehive Bunker”--a life-sized fortress-like domed hut made from concrete, with slits for windows--for a show in Graz, Austria.

What are these about? As has always been true of Burden’s work, each seeks to solve a different problem. The bridges and bullets are a “yin-yang” opposition enhanced by being seen together, Burden says. “They are opposite in their implications and opposite in the way I’ve constructed them.” The bridges, he says, “are all lacy and kind of gossamer, taking metal and making it stretch and reach. And the gold bullets are these little chunks of nuggets” representing violence, wealth, useless indulgence--the opposite of the positive connecting forces that the bridges symbolize.

His 400-square-foot “skyscraper” began life as a tongue-in-cheek test to design a real building so small that it would not need an official permit, exploiting a supposed loophole in the building code that a friend once suggested exists, although Burden has made no attempt to verify it. (In fact, according to Los Angeles County officials, standards for building permits vary according to location and are based on size, height and use of a structure.) The piece is at LACE for another two weeks, where, installed sideways in the tight gallery space, it appears as much abstract sculpture as architecture. Commissioned by LACE, it was built in collaboration with architects Linda Taalman and Alan Koch.

The lamps, by contrast, are found objects, representing a slice of L.A. history as well as a nod to the tradition of “Light and Space” art that dominated the L.A. scene in the early 1970s. In New York, Burden believes they will become a gesture of hope in the post-Sept. 11 era. “Light is one of the things that make a city a city,” Burden says. “It makes it, in real crude terms, civilized and safe after dark.”

The proposal for London and the “Beehive Bunker” were responses to specific invitations; the former to make a sculpture that would sit on a large plinth in Trafalgar Square, the latter to make a work of art from concrete. Burden’s double skyscraper proposal for London also acknowledges the terrorist attacks in New York, but he says he initially designed the form to fit the space, and without the twin towers in mind. The Beehive Bunker is yet another outgrowth of his experiments with architecture in all shapes and sizes, and, in keeping with Burden’s taste for dualities, a yin to the skyscrapers’ yang.

Burden can still be counted among the best-known and most prolific artists working in Los Angeles, a distinction that has hardly made his name a household word. He is a veteran professor who has taught for 25 years at UCLA and remains a workaholic sculptor. He has a 66-page single-spaced resume of exhibitions and publication history. Audiences from around the world--including many young artists--flock to see his work.

A self-styled naturalist, he lives and works in an ideal retreat, just beyond a vast orchard of avocado trees. Crickets crawl up and down the street lamps stacked on their sides outside, and cardboard boxes are filled with vintage toy train parts, miniature cityscapes and other unnamed detritus that one day will metamorphose into art. A grounded sailboat stands off to one side of the driveway, a reminder of Burden’s nautical interests, and, down from the home he shares with Rubins, a 1957 Ford pump truck filled with 700 gallons of water stands ready to fight forest fires.

It is a world where art, toys and rudimentary mechanics stand on equal footing as means of expressing big ideas, a place where activities traditionally seen as boy-play take on sociological and aesthetic meaning. “I don’t think of toys as childlike,” Burden says. “Toys are how children are inculcated into the adult world. They’re not just a way to entertain children, they’re a tool that is used to make them into functional adults.”

But there’s also the very basic pleasure that toys provide, Burden says. “I have all kinds of different dreams. I have traveling dreams, which are terrible. I have teaching dreams, which are terrible, usually. Nightmares. But then I have a whole set of opposite dreams, and they’re toy dreams, and they’re just scrumptious. I wake up with a smile on my face. In my dream I’m in some store and the toys are in their cases, and the level of detail and quality is . . . . I wake up and go, ‘Oh, my God, it isn’t true!’ It’s like a cornucopia. If I were a super glutton, it would be like dreaming about the feast of Ali Baba, or something.”

Asked what he thinks these dreams mean, Burden draws an uncharacteristic blank. “I don’t really care what it means, but I know it’s related to my waking life.”

Perhaps all this boils down to Burden’s continuing role as an unrepentant rebel, albeit a creative one with a multitude of causes. His greatest interest is in engineering, and he says, fully aware of the irony, “I’d rather be on the cover of Constructor Quarterly magazine than the cover of Artforum.” He recognizes that the latter is more important for what he calls “the Chris Burden persona,” but Contructor Quarterly, a slick English magazine for Meccano enthusiasts (the British equivalent of Erector Sets) is an ambition. There, he says, “you’ve touched an audience outside the art world, and that’s how powerful your art is.”

Burden’s interest in engineering may be genetic. His paternal grandfather was the dean of the College of Engineering at Tufts University from 1936 to 1957, and his father was also an engineer as well as a senior level advisor to the dean at Harvard in the Division of Engineering and Applied Physics.

His childhood was somewhat itinerant. He was born in Boston, but when he was very young his family lived briefly in China and then for many years in Europe. He says he had his first experience as an artist when his grandmother gave him a Brownie camera for his 12th birthday, at which point he set off to take pictures like those in the book “The Family of Man,” Edward Steichen’s multicultural, multiethnic panoply of images of everyday people. An inveterate archivist and collector, Burden still has some of the early pictures he took, which focused primarily on “Italian fishermen arguing on the docks and old ladies sitting in doorways.”

But while his paternal lineage might seem to have shaped him, Burden describes his father as “more of a planner,” an administrator with little interest in “nuts and bolts.” The artist, by contrast, is nothing if not tactile. His sculpture has included building cars, multiple experiments with electricity, and testing the limits of architecture, and is based on intuition and direct experiment rather than on study of physical science.

Burden spent his high school years in Cambridge, Mass., and he went to Pomona College thinking he would study architecture far from home. But the required math and physics courses didn’t interest him, so he turned to the sculpture department, which he loved. He says both of his parents were art enthusiasts and supported the move. “If anything, choosing art as a career took more [courage] than plodding along as an architect, by a long shot,” he says. “Because the way to academia seemed more clear. The idea of being a successful artist, let alone sculptor, seemed much more unobtainable.”

After graduating, he enrolled at UC Irvine for a master’s degree, where he found artists such as Robert Irwin testing the limits of perception. Burden’s insistence on personal experience in his art was an outgrowth of the study of phenomenology--but always with a twist. While Irwin and other artists gave up making objects in favor of pure exploration of visual perception, Burden’s experience-as-artwork often was a test of endurance--a physical test for the artist and an emotional one for his audiences. For one graduate school piece, Burden lived inside a school locker for five days with only water to sustain him.

Reports of Burden’s acts of endurance began appearing in art journals and other publications. Descriptions in the art press tended to be straightforward. William Wilson, then the art critic for the Los Angeles Times, expressed concern for Burden’s survival and was among the more generous in the mass media. “Burden, cut that stuff out before you really hurt yourself,” he wrote in 1972.

These days Burden’s work meets with much less skepticism. Criticism persists, although it’s usually not as strident as it was in those early days. Among the hold-outs is Hilton Kramer, critic for the New York Observer and editor and publisher of The New Criterion, who is well-known for his conservative views. After listening to a description of Burden’s recent work, Kramer responded: “I’ll just say one thing. His is the kind of career that makes me feel ashamed to be a part of the contemporary art scene.”

Such strong criticism doesn’t surprise Peter Noever, CEO and artistic director of MAK Vienna, the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts that produced a show and major catalog of Burden’s work in 1996. Noever says he is working on a new project with Burden and finds that the artist continues to provoke reactions. “I think this is the art we need,” Noever says. “Otherwise we lose our sense of understanding about life. I believe that the strategy, the way he works, is the most interesting way.”

There’s another long-term project on Burden’s mind these days. He and Rubins would like to make their property into an art park showcasing their work and the work of others. He’s nurturing a grand vision of “Chrisville,” with train tracks running across the hills. He dreams of wondrous feats of engineering that, he admits, may never happen. “It could be Chrisville, if I had 900 lives or something,” he says. “And unlimited focus, too. It isn’t just time and money; you can have all the time and money in the world, but unless you can focus it, it doesn’t get done.”

Even so, with Burden the improbable can seem possible. He says he has bought about 2,500 feet of hot-pink nylon string to mark the placement of the bridge he’s hoping to build across a quarter-mile span between two mountains on his property. Hanging a line across the ravine, he explains, will be a first step to a real footbridge, which requires heavy cable. How the string survives in the space--which Burden estimates is between 200 and 300 feet above the ground--is also a way to measure wind velocity and to “delineate that giant void between two peaks.”

As he talks about the bridge, the engineer-as-artist melds with the youthful risk-taking daredevil: “My plan is to get these really tall poles, maybe bamboo,” he says, standing halfway up one steep hill and looking across a heavily wooded canyon to another tree-covered mountain. The string will be extended manually--very primitive work.

“There’s a road that goes along that ridgeline,” he says, pointing. “So with a series of really high poles, people could move the rope loosely. The problem is that it’s not going to be a straight line, so then you have cranks at either end, so you crank it up and hope that when it comes out . . . “

He stops, bringing himself back to reality. “The trick is to keep it off the brush. There are oak trees that are 40 feet high. So maybe we can do it in stages. I don’t know.” His voice falls, but within seconds, hope revs anew. “The proof is going to be in the pudding. It’d be a suspension bridge--so you’d stand up there and then you’d walk across, like, ooooohhhhh.”

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Chris Burden’s work will be on exhibit at the Gagosian Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, through Aug. 29; at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, until July 27; and the MAK Center for Art and Architecture L.A. at the Schindler House, 835 N. Kings Road, West Hollywood, until July 27.